June 30, 2024: Welcome, welcome to our June cocktail hour! I’m so happy you’ve dropped by. It’s the perfect time of year to have drinks on our screened-in porch, although the latter part of June has been super hot. The entire East Coast has been hit with a heat wave that is not fooling around. It’s the time of year where I prefer to stay indoors!
I can offer you some chilled Prosecco or Cava, or any wine of your choice. Mike can make a delicious Vodka Tonic with fresh chunks of peaches. Or we can offer a Michelob Ultra or Hop Slam. I can also offer sodas or seltzer water of various flavors. Salud!
How is your year going so far? Have you read any good books, seen any good movies, binge-watched any television series? Have you planned any adventures or had any spring getaways? Have you dreamed any dreams? Gone to any exotic restaurants, cooked any new dishes? Have you been surprised by anything in life? Have you enjoyed the simple things in life? Have you learned anything new, taken any classes or just kept up with the news? Have you sung along with any new songs? Have you undertaken any new exercise routines? Have you marched or otherwise participated in political protests?
We started June by taking a trip to Atlanta to visit Alex, Jandira and little Allie. We haven’t seen our granddaughter except through photos and videos since she was born in October and then for a few days at Christmas. As of June 5, she was 8 months old. It was fun to see how much she’d changed.
On our way to Atlanta, we stopped in Greenville, South Carolina, an adorable town about 8 hours southwest along our driving route. We ate at Society Sandwich Bar and then walked around Falls Park on the Reedy.
Arriving in Atlanta on Monday around noon, we went immediately to visit Alex and Allie in their new apartment in Midtown Atlanta. When our Airbnb near Piedmont Park was available, we checked in and settled in. Mike worked remotely for several hours and I relaxed until it was time to meet the family at Atlantic Station, where we had a lovely dinner at Azotea Cantina. We strolled around Atlantic Station on a cool and breezy evening.
Luckily our Airbnb was within walking distance of the Atlanta Beltline, so we went for a walk on one section of it on Tuesday morning. We walked through Ponce City Market. Later that evening, we played a game of Catan at Alex and Jandira’s apartment and ordered take-out pizza.
On Wednesday, I offered to babysit Allie, so I spent the whole day at the apartment while Alex worked remotely in his office. I pushed Allie in her stroller around the apartment complex and the pool until she fell asleep; I was then able to enjoy some quiet time while she napped. Later we walked around the rooftop and I played with her until Mike came by at 2:00 to give me some relief.
On Thursday, I drove two hours to Columbus, Georgia to visit my youngest brother, Robbie, and we had lunch at a Vietnamese Restaurant. After driving back to Atlanta, in the evening, we ordered take-out sushi and played the tiniest game of Chinese Checkers ever and then a game of Code Names in our Airbnb.
On Friday afternoon, Jandira’s work team was doing a team-building exercise by hiking at Kennesaw Mountain. Mike and I decided it would be helpful if they had a child carrier for the hike, so we went to REI and bought a new child carrier for them. We stopped at Mike’s friend Paul’s new home nearby (he and his wife Theresa were moving in that day), and then took the child carrier to Alex. The family went on their hike and relaxed at their home in the evening while Mike and I went out to eat southern home cooking at Mary Mac’s Tea Room.
Saturday morning, Mike and I visited the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum. After, we met the family for lunch at Krog Street Market. We all strolled along another stretch of the Beltline. Saturday night, Mike and I did babysitting duty while Alex and Jandira went out for a game of pool and to enjoy some time to themselves. Allie had been mellow and easy for most of our visit, but she was cranky and tired; she wouldn’t go to sleep. She was rather inconsolable without her parents. It was tough for me; I had enough problems raising my own children and found myself counting the minutes until the parents returned home!
Sunday morning, we visited the Atlanta Botanical Garden, where we especially enjoyed “Alice’s Wonderland Returns.” In the afternoon we had some soaking time with the family at their apartment pool complex.
Finally, Sunday night, we met the family at Cattahoochee Food Works where we had dinner together.
Monday we drove straight home from Atlanta to home in Virginia, about a 10+ hour drive. We drove the longer but less trafficked route through Chattanooga and Knoxville. We stopped at a Buc’ee’s for gas and snacks.
We found out while we were in Atlanta that the intense TV series we’d been watching, Okkupert (Occupied), was due to be taken off of Netflix by June 29. We had a lot of episodes to finish watching of the 3-season series, so we spent every night since we got home watching episode after episode. It’s a fabulous near-future story in which Russia occupies Norway to ensure it keeps supplying the EU with oil despite popular Norwegian Prime Minister Jesper Berg’s determination to shut down oil production and switch the country’s energy production to the more climate-friendly Thorium. With many layers of political intrigue, including assassinations and terror attacks, it is a multi-layered examination of what actually could happen in the near future. We finally finished it at the end of June, just in time!
I continued walking, rowing and doing yoga. I managed to complete 250,000km of rowing at RowHouse, a milestone for me. I was depressed to find out that my favorite yoga teacher is reducing her classes to every other week. The other yoga teachers all insist on doing yoga for an entire 75-minute session, while I enjoy winding down and having a nice long savasana, also known as corpse pose, for at least the last 1o minutes of practice. Savasana allows me to integrate the wisdom of yoga practice through deep mind-body relaxation and Susan often allows time for this pose at the end of her sessions. Now that she’s reducing her classes to every-other week, I will have to find another class to do every other Wednesday.
Adam sent us a picture of little Mikey in Nicaragua, now a month old.
I took Mike out to Nue Vietnamese for a Father’s Day dinner. It was quite a lovely evening and the food was good but super expensive (not worth the prices!). Sunday, on actual Father’s Day, we did an old-fashioned hamburger/corn-on-the-cob/baked beans dinner on the grill with Mike’s sister Barb.
I voted in the Democratic Primary on Tuesday, the 18th. There wasn’t much choice on the Democratic ballot for our 11th district of Virginia, but Gerry Connolly is the most progressive of the two candidates; he got my vote and the nomination. I was happy to have done my small part.
On the 20th, Mike and I had a lovely sushi dinner at Ginger Thai and then went to Wolf Trap Center for the Performing Arts to see Wilco in concert. The concert was sold out to a relatively subdued crowd on a hot full moon night. I had caught some of Wilco’s music at various locations using my Shazam App, but I wasn’t that familiar with the 1994 Chicago-based band described as such: Wilco’s musical style has evolved from a 1990s country rock sound to a current “eclectic indie rock collective that touches on many eras and genres.” Many people there – mostly a crowd younger than us – knew all the words to the songs. I loved it at one point when one of the fans yelled, “We love you!” Lead and only singer Jeff Tweedy replied sheepishly, “Thank you for loving us!” Cute.
On the 20th, Adam also flew back to the U.S. from Nicaragua for the first time in four years. He got offered a chance to do a job getting signatures on various petitions and wanted to raise some money for the family in Nicaragua. He’ll be working for a month or two, and hopefully we will see him at the end of his time here. We haven’t seen him yet except by WhatsApp.
We went to Cinema Arts Theatre on the 22nd to see the movie Treasure, in which a Jewish father Edek, a Holocaust survivor, and his daughter Ruth, an American journalist – both from New York – take a trip to visit Poland in 1991; Ruth wants to see the places where her father grew up, the old family business; she also wants to go with her father to the Auschwitz death camp. Edek, feeling overwhelmed by the whole endeavor, tries to sabotage the trip, making for some funny scenes. There are also some very moving and heartbreaking scenes about reckoning with Edek’s horrific Holocaust memories. We enjoyed the movie and then had Indian food at Bollywood Bistro after. On the last day of the month, we saw the entertaining movie Thelma, about a 93-year-old grandmother who gets scammed out of $10,000 and goes on a quest to catch the perpetrators and recover her money.
I couldn’t stomach watching the debate between Biden and Trump on the 27th, but I read plenty to know that Trump lied relentlessly and steamrolled over Biden. Also, Biden didn’t assuage people’s concerns about his age but made people doubt his capabilities of doing the job for another 4 years. If elected, he would end his presidential term at age 86. How did we end up with these two old men, one who is a liar and a horrible person (Trump of course), and one who is kind and compassionate and has done a lot for the country but is simply too old now? What a mess this country is in. I can’t help but feel like we are doomed.
On Friday, the 28th, we went out for Nepali food (since we’d just had Indian food the previous weekend) and then back to Wolf Trap to see Shreya Ghoshal – All Hearts Tour. Ghoshal is one of Bollywood’s music megastars with a repertoire of over 3,000 songs in 300 films. Here’s one song of hers, “Yeh Ishq Hai” from the movie Jab We Met. Shreya Ghoshal is the singer, not the actor.
We were some of a few handfuls of Anglos in a crowd of nearly 7,000 mostly Indians. As I love Indian textiles, I enjoyed watching all the women decked out in their colorful saris and tunics.
Here is a short video of some of the songs from the concert. I don’t know who the man was who sung on his own and with Ghoshal.
Hearing all those songs took me back to the time when I was enthralled by Bollywood movies and back to the trip I took to India for 3 weeks with my friend Jayne in March of 2011.
Finally, I read 7 books this month, bringing my total up to 26/52, with my favorites being The Paradise Guest House by Ellen Sussman, All the Lovers in the Night by Mieko Kawakami, and The Way of the 88 Temples: Journeys on the Shikoku Pilgrimage by Robert C. Sibley.
I hope you’ll share how the year is panning out for you, and what plans you have for the summer.
~ wander.essence ~ 
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